What's new

Practicing my Japanese.

Rockuman

-Supreme Martial Artist-
30 Jun 2004
40
1
18
This will hopefully help me out a lot when I'm trying to learn this language. I'll type a sentence in Japanese, and anyone who feels like it at the time can translate it in English so that I can see if I typed what I wanted to say. I'd appreciate any help that's given to me.

*ahem*

コンイチワ。 ワタシ ワ フリリプ。 ワタシ ワ アメリカジン デス。 ワタシ ワ フトバォ。 ワタシ ノ ソレ ホンメイ。

EDIT: I did it in Katakana(or however you spell it) by accident. I keep gettng mixed up, so here's Hiragan.

こにちわ。 わたし わ ふりりぷ。 わたし わ あめりかじん です。 わたし わ どうよう づとばぉ。わたし の それ わ ほんめい です。

Alright. I just hope I typed the same thing in both times. :)



That's all I'll do for now. Once again, any help is greatly appeciated. :)
 
hey man^^ alright, i suck at the language.. but that's alot of katakana for one sentence :eek:

i'm pretty sure atleast konichiwa at the start isn't supposed to be katakana but hiragana ^^

i'm not even gonna bother reading the rest, since i suck too much to correct anything and my brain hurts when i read kana >_<
 
こにちわ。 わたし わ ふりりぷ。 わたし わ あめりかじん です。 わたし わ どうよう づとばぉ。わたし の それ わ ほんめい です。

Good start! Let me go over and help with what I can (I'm still new too.)

こんにちは。 Konnichiwa. This is the correct way to say it. Notice that wa is actually HA here.

わたしのなまえはフリリプです。 I assume this was you trying to give your name. If it was more direct and clear, I would write it this way. Your name, because it is a foreign word, needs to be in katakana. All foriegn words are... for the most part unless they are intergrated into Japanese.

わたしはアメリカじんです。 This was good, just the same thing with the particle wa and america needs to be in katakana.

わたし わ どうよう づとばぉ。わたし の それ わ ほんめい です。 I don't know what you wrote here... sorry.

(Edit: If it is clear you are speaking of yourself, you do not need to use watashi over and over. In Japanese unlike English, it is avoided if possible and makes you sound obsessed with yourself.)
 
For that one line, I think he's trying to say his favorite hobby or sport or something is football(?). ^^;

Keiichi

😊
 
But Furiripo doesn't sound like foot ball? Sounds almost like he is trying to say Phillip
 
Keiichi said:
For that one line, I think he's trying to say his favorite hobby or sport or something is football(?). ^^;

Keiichi

😊

Wow! I can't beleive I actually managed to communicate that line over! Maybe I will learn this (in a year or two)

Emoni: I had Furiripu(Phillip) in there, along with futobalu(which I assumed would cross over as football). And about the watashi thing, how should I write the sentences while still making sure the other person knows I'm refering to myself? And if you answer, make it Romaji please. :)
 
Wow, nice one Keiichi.

Well, lets see. You could flip the sentences around where you simply say something like.

Hajimemashite. (Glad to meet you)
Watashi no namae wa Furiripu desu. Amerikajin desu. Futobaru wo shimasu.

I believe you could even leave out watashi in all of this because you are making a greeting and it is fairly obvious you are talking about yourself. While this is a very cut up sentence, it can give you an example of how you might go about saying things different ways, even with the limited amount of vocab-ammo that you have now.

Keep up the good work.

But beware, you used up your one time Romaji ticket ;) If you want to really learn Japanese, Hiragana is one of the absolute FIRST things you need to learn. It is just memorization, and if you work at it you can literally get it down in one or two days. It is very important as a first step.
 
Actually, that's true. I've printed out the sheet, so it wouldn't be that much extra work if I just tried to figure it out.

Again, thanks a lot for the help. I'll do some more studying and see if I can make a better one, and maybe a full paragraph.
 
Be careful with your "wa" particle, as it's written using the "ha" kana. Also, when talking about football, it's written "futoboru," and you can distinguish the American style by calling it "amefuto." For traditional football, I've heard people also use "saka."
 
Thanks, but why does 'wa' suddenly become 'ha'? Is that just the way it is? Or is there a reason behind it to help me remember?
 
Good question... studied Japanese for 4 years about now, and never really found out :/ The particle E (for to go) changes to "he."

Probably to just distinguish more from other words, thats a total guess though.
 
Emoni said:
Wow, nice one Keiichi.
I looked at his "katakana version," which apparently was a bit different than his new "hiragana version." :D The フトバォ (futobao? :D) apparenly sounded like football in some way. :LOL:

But keep it up, rockman. Yep, it'll be a good idea to lean the hiragana first. :)

Keiichi

😊
 
Rockuman said:
Thanks, but why does 'wa' suddenly become 'ha'? Is that just the way it is? Or is there a reason behind it to help me remember?

Basically, you've got it right there. Although I did see a discussion of this on another forum...lemme go dig it up.

*digs*

The story behind the wa/ha difference is something along the following lines:

In ancient Japanese, the 'ha' sound used to be very common, but for whatever reason, people dropped the 'ha' sound in favor of the 'wa' sound in many words. (eg 'kawa' used to be pronounced 'kaha' ). The spelling however was not updated to reflect this fact until they finally decided to implement writing reforms about 50 years ago. So now all words are spelled in a logical manner... except for the particles は、へ、を, which still reflect the old pronounciation that nobody uses anymore (why they didn't update them, I don't know. I guess that will be for another post)

So basically, 'wa' used to be pronounced as 'ha' and as such it is spelled as 'ha'.

The same thing goes for 'e' which used to be pronounced 'he', and 'o' which used to be pronounced 'wo'

Similar reasons exist behind other inconsistant spellings, such as why king is 'ousama' and big is 'ookii', and not 'oosama' or 'oukii'.

It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it.

His source text is here, but it's in French. Hope that helps, and keep this up! This is really good practice for you to figure out on your own (and why this is the only kind of information you're gonna get out of me =P).

[Ignore the part below]

日本語がよく出来る方々へ

このスレッドで返事しなかった方がいいと思っております。というのは上のような情報以外(例えば英訳・和訳する事)などのポストするのを遠慮しましょう。自分で考えさせてあげた方がいいでしょうね。日本語を勉強し始めた生徒たちとしてもよくやっていてそして習っているようですね。返事すればちょっと邪魔に成るだけかもしれません。

これが読み解けるならよろしくお願いしま~す m(_ _)m
 
^ Ok now THAT was interesting...

Never would have guessed that to be the reason. That seems like a fairly major change for a language.
 
Similar reasons exist behind other inconsistant spellings, such as why king is 'ousama' and big is 'ookii', and not 'oosama' or 'oukii'.

It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it.

From my reading it seems that the reason for this is that ou is an on reading and ookii is a native Japanese word. Chinese approximated long vowels go ei and ou, while native Japanese words with elongated vowels are written ee and oo. This is evident with the sentence final nee. I think I read that in Hadamitzki and Spahn's "Kanji and Kana - A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System."
 
Here's a smaller sentence I'm try my hand at.

あめりかわこまかくないとつまらん。

I don't really think it's boring by the way (if I managed to write that correctly). I just put that there for the sake of writing something.
And another thing, does Japanese use spaces? If not, how are you supposed to figure out where words do end?
 
Are you trying to compose a sentence? What is the English of the sentence you are trying to compose?

No, Japanese does not use spaces. In the beginning, however, it is recommended that you put in spaces, so you can tell where one word ends and the next one begins. As your vocabulary increases, you will actually get good at telling where words end, and spaces will eventually become unnecessary. If you write whole sentences in hiragana only (like your sample above), it IS recommended that you put spaces in between the words.
 
Rockuman said:
Here's a smaller sentence I'm try my hand at.

あめりかわこまかくないとつまらん。

I don't really think it's boring by the way (if I managed to write that correctly). I just put that there for the sake of writing something.
And another thing, does Japanese use spaces? If not, how are you supposed to figure out where words do end?
アメリカ (America) は 細かくない (not small, lacking detail) と つまらん(boring).

By the way, as far as I can deconstruct, this has nothing to do with 'I don't really think it's boring, by the way' :)
 
Elizabeth said:
アメリカ (America) は 細かくない (not small, lacking detail) と つまらん(boring).

By the way, as far as I can deconstruct, this has nothing to do with 'I don't really think it's boring, by the way' :)

The problem with that is that the と has a different function when joining verbs/adjectives together. It becomes a conditional (it has an "if" function, in other words).

So you would end up with "If America isn't 細かい, it is つまらない. Not at all what you intended to say.

I'll leave the appropriateness of the choice of 細かい to express smallness in this case for others.
 
mikecash said:
I'll leave the appropriateness of the choice of 細かい to express smallness in this case for others.
You can't be bothered with the small details, huh?
 
Okay, I just got done with some Katakana training. There's a few (read as "a lot") of symbols I still don't know by heart yet, but I'm still doing some studying.

I'd like someone to try and quiz mein Katakana, by writing sentences (Engrish words, but in Katakana) and have me try to figure them out. When I'm confident with my Katakana reading, I'll try at Hiragana... and that'll probably take me a while..
 
Don't worry overly much about katakana. I never studied them and I turned out alright.
 
Well, I've already spend about five days looking over it, so there's no turning back now...
 
Back
Top Bottom